ABSTRACT
The earliest well-known land plants, from Wales and Aberdeenshire, were something like mosses, though probably nearer to the club mosses or Lycopodiums. There were insects, whose remains are very badly preserved. The earliest known were wingless, but winged forms soon appeared which probably resembled grasshoppers; and towards the end of the Devonian the first bones of four-footed vertebrates are found. During much of the Devonian period the Scottish Highlands were already above water. The Hercynian revolution folded England appreciably, and lifted most of it well above sea level. This chapter describes the first two hundred million years of the geological history of England. At the end of the Silurian period the country was involved in a phase of mountain-building called the Caledonian revolution. Some mountains had already been formed in what are now the Scottish Highlands. The folding process now also spread to Lowland Scotland and Wales.
